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Back in (BeagleBone) Black

After a short hiatus, I’ve dusted off my BeagleBone Black (BBB) and started tinkering again. This time I replaced Angstrom with Ubuntu 13.04. Angstrom is a good distribution for the truly embedded projects, i.e. ones that require a small footprint and low-level IO, but for more application-level play, I think Ubuntu is a bit more user friendly.

I followed the instructions on Adafruit’s website and chose the eMMC flasher for Ubuntu 13.04 found here. Adafruit has detailed instructions for how to prepare the micro-SD card for the mac and after rebooting, the board booted right into Ubuntu.

So what am I doing with the board? Well it’s running my Bitlbee server and then I’m using Emacs’ ERC as a client to that server. I heard John Wiegley say in an interview with Sacha Chua, that he runs a second Emacs instance just for ERC. Well, I’m doing that but running it on the BBB🙂

Then I configured the BBB as a Tor bridge / relay. I never really wanted to run this from my main computer since I felt I couldn’t spare the processor time😉 , but now I can offload it to the BBB. At the moment the bridge is disabled since I want to restrict the hours it is running, but initial testing proved successful.

Ultimately, it would be nice if the BBB could tweet me or otherwise inform me of “interesting” things, whatever those are. Maybe when the temperature in the house is too high / cold or when the door opens.

Interesting. I can’t decide if I want the notifications to *only* go to the phone or not though…

So, how do I get a sensor cape? That thing is loaded! I just put the BBB in the adafruit enclosure so that cape would fit in there nicely and have this temperature sensor (among other things) that I’m after…

Yeah I assumed that might be a drawback of Pushover. In that case Twitter isn’t too difficult to set up, I just though Pushover was pretty cool so I had to try it out.

Ah the SensorCape, I’m working on it man. My first batch of test boards are supposed to arrive by this Friday. After that I will need to assemble and test them, if everything goes well I will be doing my best to get them in to production since there has been plenty of interest.

An easy way to get Ubuntu going quickly on the BeagleBone Black without the hassle of downloading, flashing, etc.: You can get a micro SD flash with Ubuntu 13.04 pre-installed and configured for the BeagleBone Black: